Instant Tea is no attorney, but we can read. And having now thoroughly perused a Dallas appeals court’s gay divorce ruling from Tuesday, we’d say it doesn’t take a law degree to tell you that it’s bad — like, real bad.

The gay divorce ruling reads like an anti-thesis to U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision last month declaring Prop 8 unconstitutional. Thankfully, we can take comfort in knowing that the gay divorce ruling will have a limited impact in terms of legal precedent. And maybe, just maybe, it will serve as a helpful reminder about just how far the LGBT community has to go in places like Texas.

Anyhow, we’ll have much more about the ruling in Friday’s Dallas Voice, but for now we thought we’d share this statement sent out Tuesday afternoon by Equality Texas:

The Fifth District Court of appeals has taken the most extreme, the most conservative view possible on each issue before it. It’s not as if they wanted to just overturn the trial court’s decision, they wanted to smash it into ground and discourage anyone from ever filing a pro-LGBT suit ever again.

The ruling harkens back to a view of the world from generations past — a world where LGBT people were content to live in closets, and were afraid to demand to be treated with dignity and respect. A dignity and respect that this court goes out of its way to completely deny.

In going so far to overturn the trial court’s decision, with such an extreme opinion, the appellate court has lowered the bar for any effort to overturn its ruling:

• The Court’s view of marriage is historically inaccurate. Marriage existed in many forms, for many reasons, for many thousands of years.

• Refusal to view sexual orientation as a suspect class singled out for disparate and discriminatory treatment ignores both the entire purpose of DOMA and the anti-marriage amendment, as well as the well-documented history of discrimination, hate crimes, and statutory treatment of LGBT individuals.

• The Court’s view of same-sex relationships is uninformed, outdated and homophobic — predicating its decision upon the ability to have children naturally — thereby ignoring the thousands of Texas households raising kids with same-sex parents, or even single parent households.

• The ruling holds Texas’ laws are “rationally related to the legitimate state interest in fostering the best possible environment for procreation and child-raising.” Evidently to the exclusion of all others, and without a shred of evidence in the record — particularly since longitudinal studies have demonstrated that same-sex parents are as good as raising kids as straight couples.